Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Dr. Hillas was operating on a woman on the 13th January 1872 for a large ovarian cyst which was found at the time of procedure to contain 11 litres of fluid.

To his suprise on opening the abdomen he discovered his patient was also full term pregnant.

So, he decided he'd incise the uterus and remove the baby as well as drain the cyst.

This ended up being the first caeserean section performed in Australian. And even more shockingly, as the mortality rate for a caeserean section at this time was enormously high, both the mother and the infant survived.

(Dr Hillas's home Winchester House in Ballarat)

Dr. Hillas eventually left Ballarat and moved to Wagga Wagga where he practiced until his death in 1892.

The first planned caeserean section in Australia did not occur thereafter until 1885 at the Alfred in Melbourne and the procedure was still rare until the 1950s as the mortality rate was close to 25%. By the 1950s thanks to antibiotics it had become the accepted solution for seriously obstructed labour and was being used in 2-5% of cases with a mortality rate of 0.15%.

All of which means Dr. Hillas's patients were very lucky!

*(Some may argue he was in fact a surgeon but I would suggest that the early rural doctors who saw all manner of patients were the quintessential General Practitioners and so I will claim them for my specialty)

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Many doctors chose to leave their practice during WWII and sign up for the Australian Army medical corps. Our subject today was one such doctor.

Dr. Leslie MacDonald Outridge was born in Brisbane on the 1st November 1900. He was a graduate of the University of Sydney in 1924, and then returned to practice in various locations around Queensland before settling on Gympie to set up his own practice.